


Risk Reduction and Emergency Preparedness

by spunknbite



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Body Horror, But he wakes up alone in the cavern so that sucks, Discussions of HIV/AIDS, Discussions of Suicide, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Homophobia, Inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Near Drowning, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:13:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21725812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spunknbite/pseuds/spunknbite
Summary: Eddie wakes up in greywater and he wonders which disease will kill him.Well, that’s not wholly true. Eddie wakes up in greywater and thinks, in this order:Shit.What happened?Where’s Richie?Neck deep in sewage, it’s only then he wonders:How many cases of cholera occur domestically every year? Six? Seven? What are the chances I’m one of them?
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 186
Kudos: 623





	1. Chapter 1

According to 2017 CDC data, the latest publicly available, just short of seven thousand people die annually in the continental United States from diseases in which the pathogen is transmitted via water (6,939 people to be precise, and if that distinction seems pedantic to you, it’s because you haven’t obtained two master’s degrees in statistics and survey methodology, and don’t understand that when calculating life insurance premiums for homeowners in possession of pools or hot tubs, or for those living in counties with high contamination rates, that difference of sixty-one people can cost a company, conservatively, hundreds of thousands of dollars over the lifespan of those potential clients, and upwards of several million in the event of a widespread outbreak).

Of those 6,939 deaths, ninety-one percent are caused by pathogens that reproduce in water, namely Legionnaires’, nontuberculous mycobacterial infections, and Pseudomonas-related pneumonia or septicemia.

The remaining nine percent of deaths are caused by pathogens transmitted by fecal contamination in the water: Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, E. coli, Giardia, Hepatitis A, Salmonella, and Shigella. That nine percent is fairly low compared to much of the world, given that the sanitation standards in the United States are relatively robust, and so the data doesn’t include the really scary shit that almost never crops up, statistically speaking, in America: cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever.

Most people in the United States don’t contract those diseases because they simply don’t have the opportunity to be exposed to the environments that cause them. Most people in the United States don’t wade around the sewer in untreated greywater with open wounds.

Eddie wakes up in greywater knowing all of this, and he wonders which disease will kill him.

Well, that’s not wholly true. Eddie wakes up in greywater and thinks, in this order:

_Shit._

_What happened?_

_Where’s Richie?_

Neck deep in sewage, it’s only then he wonders:

_How many cases of cholera occur domestically every year? Six? Seven? What are the chances I’m one of them?_

His vision is spotty, the cavern dark without the glare of the Deadlights above, but he can tell the topography has shifted. The walls have caved in around him; the open, loft-like center has collapsed entirely into It’s lair, and the glassy shards of the outer circle stick up through piles of boulders. The roof of the crevasse above him has acted like a shield, because the small section he’s curled up under is still intact, and as far as he can tell, he’s managed to evade any crush injuries.

Everything is wet, though. Putrid, foul-smelling greywater laps at his chin, streaming in from a crack in the crevasse above, frothy and thick with slime and - Eddie doesn’t want to think what else - so he jostles away from the overhead deluge, and peers out into the body of the cavern, blinking to try to acclimate his eyes to the dark.

Water pours into the main cavern too, raining from somewhere Eddie can’t make out. He thinks he might see wooden planks and concrete cinder blocks hanging precariously out of a fissure many storeys high above, but the air is thick with powdered grime, obscuring his sight. A few beams of muted, golden light bend through the debris, illuminating only empty darkness, stray trickles of water, and the fine mist of granular dust that permeates the air, and Eddie realizes, _it’s daylight outside_.

“Richie?” He calls. “Bill? Guys?”

He listens for a response - for some smart-mouthed comment from Rich - but only the rush of greywater sounds in the cavern.

_Where are they?_

He jerks up, bracing himself on the wall of the crevasse as he gets his footing on rocks newly slippery with refuse. The world spins around him, his axis shifting violently back, and he falls into the greywater, managing to keep his head above the water line as his knee smashes into a sharp rock below, tearing through his jeans, scraping open his skin.

“Fuck.” A steadying breath, and he hauls himself back up. “Richie?” Eddie yells again, holding onto an inlet in the crevasse. “Where the fuck are you? I know you didn’t leave me here, asshole.”

Richie had just been here - hadn’t he? - leaning over him and saying _something_. Eddie hadn’t heard any of it; he’d watched Richie’s mouth move and tried to listen through the soggy swamp that was his inner ears. The world had been muted and colorless, muddled and silent as though Richie had pulled him under the water of the quarry in the sort of games they used to play as kids. Eddie had tried to make out what Richie was saying, because the idiot looked so fucking intent about whatever it was, but he was too waterlogged - blood in his ears, blood in his brain - to understand him.

Richie’s hand had wrenched into his shoulder - and Eddie had understood that, though - a desperate, mooring grip of dirty nails and white knuckles, and Richie’s other hand had held his, their bloody fingers laced together over his chest. _Bloody_.

_Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck._

Pennywise and the fucking claw and the _rip_ of it through him like he was made out of paper, like all of his muscle and tissue and bone amounted to nothing. The pain: a shift of organs, an internal pressure not meant to be felt, a shattering of bones - his spine? - and a sudden numbness that prickled like the needles in the doctors’ offices of his childhood.

And he remembers thinking, as he laid motionless on the floor of the cavern, craning his neck to see if it was Richie’s footsteps he heard running towards him, that wherever it had impaled him, it must have missed his trachea because he was still functionally breathing. But ( _rasp rasp rasp_ , a crackle in his bronchioles; a death rattle) it definitely got a lung or maybe just enough of his ribs that they crushed a lung, because either way he was inhaling sharp, metallic blood with every breath, drowning in the stuff that was supposed to keep him alive. He had pawed at the wound - around the upper kidney, maybe? - but everything was so slick with blood and something else, something mucusy and viscous (entrails, innards, guts, intestinal fluid; bacteria-filled organs that needed to be wrapped up, encased to protect the rest of the body from the filth that passed through them, but now they were open and festering), and Eddie couldn’t determine the extent of the damage other than to know _I’m dying. I’m fucking dead._

Richie had ran to him first - bug eyes huge and horror struck behind his glasses - and Richie moved him against the wall of the crevasse and laid him out gently like it mattered if he was comfortable, like Eddie could feel anything below his waist.

Now Eddie grabs his chest, frenzied, and shifts his weight from one leg to the other to feel that they were both working.

_What the fuck?_

He should still be hemorrhaging. Or, he should be _done_ hemorrhaging; he should have spilled the one and a half gallons of blood from his body, leaving him empty and deflated. He should have cooled to room temperature by now, and rigor should have set in. Something that most people don’t know, but Eddie does because he was pre-med for two years before transferring out to clean, sterile statistics: some parts of the body stay alive for days after death - skin cells, gut bacteria - and that’s what causes initial decomposition. It’s those last, living stragglers breaking down that putrefy the corpse. That bacteria is why dead bodies smell rotten and turn green and bloat; and Eddie is so covered in contaminated greywater and intestinal fluid and the microbes that come with it that he _should_ be nothing more than a blistered, broken open, decomposing puddle of fucking human goo.

Eddie swallows a retch.

It’s just that he’s not decomposing. He’s not even bleeding. He presses his water-shriveled palm into his chest and there’s no pain, no shredded nerves, no decaying wound. The hole in his shirt is caked with dried viscera and a tar-like black gel that might be congealed organ gunk, and beneath that hole is closed skin. A jagged, raised scar, completely healed.

“Richie?” He screams, clinging to the wall of the crevasse as his legs buckle. “Richie, please!”

_What the fuck is going on? I don’t want to be here. Please, don’t leave me here alone._

Eddie’s legs give out beneath him and he’s submerged in the greywater again, spluttering as his tries to stand back up, shaking.

What had happened? What the fuck was he? Some zombie from one of the shitty horror flicks Richie used to drag him to at The Capitol on weekends? Some decrepit, rotting leper that would soon start shedding its disintegrating limbs? Some alien-made abomination, a fucking ressurected corpse?

Or was this some delusion? Another clown-induced hallucination to prey on his fears? Trapped in the sewers, drowning in greywater, alone.

It didn’t feel like an illusion. It felt real, and that was terrifying.

 _I shouldn’t be able to walk,_ he thinks. _I shouldn’t even be able to move_.

Somehow he does move though. He shambles back up, fingers digging into the crevasse like a rock climber’s as he pulls himself along the sheer rock face towards the body of the cavern, his hands wet-cracked and bloody as they dig into the craggy surface, split open from being submerged in fetid water for God knows how long.

Boulders cover the floor, rugged and uneven, and there’s no clear path to walk anymore, no flat surface to navigate. Only rocks to scale and water to wade through.

“Richie?” He tries again, quieter this time as he surveys the spikes of It’s lair poking through the boulders.

He’d watched as Richie joined the others there, he remembers.

_Oh God._

He runs forward without falling.

The boulders are lodged in place, crushed into the ground so that thick fault lines radiate out from the impact, and Eddie can’t move them, can’t even budge one as he shoves into it, trembling, unable to get a proper foothold in the pool of greywater at his feet.

“You have to be alive,” he says weakly, pulling back on one of the smaller boulders. He loses his balance and slips backwards, landing hard on his ass in a puddle. “I don’t want to leave without you.”

He circles the lair as best as he can, scaling some of the smaller boulders around the edge to see if there’s any possible way in, any route to get to the interior of the pile where someone might be trapped. Eddie pulls himself up onto one, knees scrambling and wet with blood as they drag across the serrated surface; then he manages to climb to another and another, looking down into the crevices between the rocks for _anything_.

A hand. A shoe. Glasses. Eddie’s not sure he actually wants to see anything, whether he can handle confirmation of the sick, twisted feeling eating at his stomach - a stomach that should be eviscerated but somehow isn’t - but he still looks.

He finds nothing anyway.

_If I’m alive, they must be too, right? Please._

“Richie!” He sobs one final time. He knows that if Richie could answer, he would.

Eddie slumps off of the rocks, chest heaving, alone in the greywater again.

*

There was a poster that hung in the first doctor’s office Eddie remembers visiting, a small place off of Center Street that had a bin of toys in the waiting room that he wasn’t allowed to play with because contagious kids had touched them, his mom had explained. The poster sat just below the eye chart near the receptionist’s desk, at the right level for a small child to see. Had he been a toddler then? A preschooler?

The poster showed a child’s handprint, a colorful blue against a white background, and the hand wasn’t much bigger than Eddie’s at the time, he remembers thinking. It crawled with cartoonish, cockroach-like bugs along the pointer finger and fuzzy-looking, spotted circles over the palm and clusters of barbed rods across the index and pinkie fingers, and it made Eddie squeeze his own fists tight, protectively, to shield them from whatever it was that had infected that kid’s hands.

“What’s it say, mommy?” He’d asked, sneakers clacking together off the edge of the grown-up sized chair he sat in, waiting to be called into an exam room.

“It says to always wash your hands because of germs,” she’d answered kindly. “You know about those.”

Eddie _did_ know about those. He knew about a lot of things. He knew that germs made you sick, like with the flu, and that kids died from the flu every year, especially small ones with weak immune systems like him. He knew that the flu made you hot and sticky like a sunburn, except that it was an internal sort of heat - the brain cranked up the body’s temperature to kill the virus, his mom had told him once, except that sometimes with delicate children the fever killed the kid along with the virus - and that’s why he had to wash his hands and stay safe from dirty, dangerous things.

Death was permanent, he knew even then. People didn’t come back.

_Dad._

“Germs look like bugs?” He asked, eyeing the cockroaches on the poster.

“Yes,” his mom said immediately.

Eddie swallowed and curled up a bit, knees to his chest. “I don’t like bugs.”

“That’s why you have to stay clean, Eddie Bear.”

He had nodded.

Eddie only somewhat recalls the doctor: a greying man with small, circular glasses that sat at the very tip of his nose and a smile that seemed to indicate to Eddie that he was a genuinely okay guy, and not just some bored asshole who hated the mundane day-in, day-out of being a GP in a shitty town like Derry, although Eddie wouldn’t have articulated any of that at the time. Eddie had been playing with a toy truck they’d brought from home when the doctor said something like, “It’s common when kids start daycare - they get sick a lot in the first year. New set of germs, and you can only do so much about their hygiene when they’re this small.” The doctor had chuckled, ruffling Eddie’s hair, but his mom was frowning. “Good for the immune system in the long run, can’t bubble wrap him forever, Mrs. Kaspbrak. You understand, as a nurse.”

Looking back, that had been a very reasonable thing to say. Which was probably why they stopped seeing him and switched to a different practice out of town, just south on the interstate.

*

The small chasm that they’d used to enter the cavern - the one that led back to the hatch - it’s blocked entirely, covered by layers of boulders too heavy to even attempt to push away; they’re stacked up against the wall of the cave, storeys high.

Eddie hoists himself up onto one of those boulders, soaked sneakers slipping down the side as he panics for a foothold. A grab at the top of the boulder onto a mercifully stable ledge, and he yanks himself up, breathing hard, and then sits down on the edge.

Bill and Mike and Bev and Ben. And Richie. He tries not to look at the buried lair. He tries not to think about mangled limbs and fractured bones and crushed skulls; bodies cleaved apart from the enormous force of the rock, lacerated and snapped in two. The boulders are big, heavy; a direct hit to the head would have been instantaneous, one to the torso would have been fast, he’s sure. It’s only a little comforting.

He doesn’t picture Richie’s already cracked glasses now completely shattered.

What had happened when Richie joined the others in the lair? Is that why he’s alive and they’re not? Some sort of bullshit, alien magic or science or something else equally unquantifiable and unknowable?

Eddie traces the ropey scar on his chest.

He can’t remember anything much past Richie’s last squeeze of his shoulder. A lingering brush of fingers like Richie had wanted to say something else, gone before Eddie could even fully understand it, then a jarring shift as Richie’s weight pulled away, and movement further into the cavern that he couldn’t discern, he remembers; the world had been so dim around him already, the only source of light Richie leaning over him. He was like the center of a camera’s focal point, the rest of the cavern cloudy and blurred, and once Richie stood up to join the others, the light went with him and everything was entirely dark.

_Fuck you, Richie. Fuck you for getting up and leaving and getting yourself fucking killed._

He closes his eyes. He’s not going to cry. He slams his oozing hands onto the boulder instead and swears as a layer of sodden skin sloughs off.

_Fuck you, Richie. Fuck you and your stupid jokes and your dipshit pranks and every disgusting thing you ever did when we were kids._

Mud slinging and wet willies and spitting on his hand before high fives without telling Eddie and wiping his snotty nose on his sleeve and pressing germy elevator buttons without washing his hands after and his hair-trigger vomiting reflex and the belching and dick jokes and his annual bout of the flu that he’d still come to school with anyway, flushed and sweaty and infectious, trailing the virus everywhere he went.

_Fuck you, Richie._

He curls into his knees like a little kid and cries.

And now, his homeless-person hair and bargain-bin clothing when he can clearly afford better and the oversized glasses that he’s apparently never updated and he still snorts when he laughs at his own shitty jokes and -

 _He used to snort when he laughed._ Past fucking tense.

Eddie wipes his eyes with the back of his hands and wonders whether he’ll get conjunctivitis from the microbes that are certainly growing on him at this point.

Conjunctivitis is the least of his worries.

Trapped. Trapped in a fucking sewer. Trapped near the Goddamn alien lair that haunted him long after he forgot Derry; nightmares of floating corpses decaying as they lay stranded in the air. Trapped in the same room as Richie is buried. From his vantage point on the boulder, Eddie can see that the outbound tunnels are also blocked off, their entrances barricaded with impassable bedrock. The walls are too sheer to climb; the distant beams of light above far out of reach. There’s no way out.

_I’m fucked. It would have been better to have stayed dead from blood loss._

Hypovolemic shock, a.k.a. losing so much blood that the heart can’t pump enough to sustain the entire body. _As far as fucking dying went, it hadn’t been that bad_.

Symptoms: anxiety ( _yeah, no shit_ ), confusion, clammy skin, pale color, sweating, rapid breathing, and unconsciousness.

Complications: kidney damage, gangrene, brain damage, heart attack, total organ failure, and death.

Treatment: nothing that can be done in a fucking cave, man.

The great thing about hypovolemic shock though is that the patient is generally unconscious before the heart attack and organ failure hits. Plus it’s quick, so all things considered it could have been worse.

 _This_ was worse.

Sepsis; it would be sepsis that did him in this time, he was sure. Blood poisoning, from when a body is so badly infected that the chemicals in the bloodstream go haywire and the whole body just gives up and shuts down. Eddie glances at his cracked hands and torn knees; there was also the formerly gaping hole in his chest and the stab through his cheek. All bathing in a lake of greywater and bacteria and little bug-shaped pathogens, ulcerating and sick.

Symptoms: fever and chills, low body temperature, rapid pulse, rapid breathing, nausea and vomiting, and diarrhea.

Complications: septic shock, a fatal drop in blood pressure that results in total organ failure and death.

Treatment: still shit out of luck here.

It wouldn’t be fast, at least relative to hypovolemic shock. In rapid cases, death takes twelve hours, and that’s after the initial infection causes sepsis.

If the sepsis didn’t get him first, Eddie supposes it would just be run-of-the-mill dehydration.

_That’s supposing I can die._

What if whatever kept him alive from the blood loss and organ damage saved him from sepsis too? What if he was trapped here indefinitely?

_Fuck fuck fuck._

He gasps for breath, the cavern suddenly small and oppressive, the air thin in the constriction of the space, and he reaches instinctively for an inhaler in his pocket. Gone, obviously.

Eddie wheezes and watches a cascade of greywater meander down the newly created bluff like some sort of polluting waterfall, bubbling into the pool surrounding the boulders. He leans back on the rock, hands in his hair, and thinks, _if I can scale one of the taller boulders, I can just jump._

_And if I survive and end up with broken legs too?_

_Could it be any worse than now?_

*

The spring before Georgie was taken, Eddie’s mom sat down next to him under the cover of the back porch and said, “Richard is a rotten influence. He’s not _clean_ , Eddie Bear.”

Rain poured down around them, spilling off of the roof of the porch and out of the eavestroughs, and Eddie watched the gardens overflow under the torrent. Drowned. Inundated. The roots of freshly sprouted flowers dredged above the soil.

It wasn’t an entirely unprovoked statement. He’d spent the better part of the afternoon with Bill and Stan and Richie several blocks south where the streets sloped downwards, the four of them splashing in muddy trenches from the recent, unrelenting rainfall. Richie had sloshed his boots back and forth like a water mill, spraying Eddie with every kick, and when Eddie finally had enough and pushed him into an especially deep puddle, Richie only laughed and pulled Eddie down with him.

He thought he’d planned it right and given himself enough time to get home and showered and changed before his mom got back from her shift, but she’d been waiting for him at the kitchen table when he opened the door, soaked in swampy water, rubber boots filled with muck.

“I know you’re so sensitive and have trouble making friends,” she kneaded his back in overly hard circles, as if trying to push him into the ground, root him to the spot in the backyard. “So I’m not saying you can’t see him. But you need to be careful. His sort of behavior can rub off on a person. Things like this,” she gestured to his overturned rain boots, dripping mud onto the scuffed paint of the porch, “they always seem to happen when you’re with him. You need to think about the risks of your actions.”

Swimming in dirty quarry water (risks: E. coli and other waterborne bacterial and fungal infections), digging in the Barrens (risks: tetanus, botulism, and toxoplasmosis), sledding down the steep hill on the backend of the Bagshaw property (risks: a garden-variety rhinovirus mutating into bronchitis or pneumonia), afternoons at the arcade (risks: staph infections from germ-covered joysticks and buttons).

“People get sick for so many reasons and in so many ways. Sometimes people’s insides rot before their outsides do.” Her nails dug into the back of Eddie’s neck. “Richard’s impulsive and crude, and that’s only going to aggravate as he gets older. You don’t want to associate with the types of people who are sick on the inside. You don’t want to risk it.”

Time with Richie (risks: a nauseated fluttering in his gut like a stomach flu, like the pathogens that colonized Richie’s hands had infected him through every casual touch that Eddie tried to dismiss as meaningless; like an airborne virus transmitted between them from every time Richie stood _too close_ ).

“I see it everyday at work, sweetie. The homeless, drug addicts, prostitutes from downtown Dexter, _queers_ , mental cases so sick on downers that they can’t even swallow their own saliva. They choke on their drool, Eddie. You don’t want that, do you?” Eddie shook his head. “All of them are ill, diseased with dirty minds and hearts, and it’s only a matter of time before that spreads to their bodies and they atrophy.”

He remembers wiping his sweaty palm on his shorts, trying to rub off whatever lingering microbes Richie had passed to him when he’d pulled him down into the puddle, hands grasped together for only a moment before Eddie hit the sodden pavement with a _splash_.

Eddie was a small boy with a weak immune system; he knew he was susceptible.

*

Alone, he fights the panic welling in his chest, spreading through his body like a virus of its own; his heart (it should be starved for oxygen; it should be still, the muscles degrading) is tachycardic, his hands twitching, and he swallows past a lump in his throat like it’s a fucking tumor, pharyngeal or laryngeal cancer.

He’ll be eaten alive by the bacteria swarming him. They must be burrowing into the open skin of his palms, slipping past his corneas and swimming into the fleshy, watery interior of his eyes, gagging him and reproducing on his tongue, and Eddie can barely breathe for the certainty of it. He’ll be supplanted, and it will still be hours until his body is fully excavated, hollowed out by wriggling protozoa and prokaryotes to make space for more pathogens to usurp him; liquefying his organs, multiplying and festering until he's just a shell and septic shock finally finishes him.

_Unless sepsis doesn’t finish me. Unless I just mold and canker and fester forever._

He needs out now.

Shaking, Eddie braces himself against another, taller boulder and manages to climb another level, then another. The rocks, wet and soapy from the ever-present drizzle overhead, are at the very least solid, substantial, something to cling to.

_I don’t want to be alone here. I’d rather be dead. I’m fucking dead already._

Four storeys minimum for a lethal fall, the higher the better to increase the odds. He looks at the pointed rocks below - _this has to be five storeys, right?_ \- and he scales another boulder as insurance. Then one more.

His back knocks into the wall of the cavern, and he takes a shuddering breath.

Like jumping off the cliff at the quarry. Something he must have done a hundred times over a few summers. The first had been terrifying, but it had been fine by the end; repetition bred ease. _No big deal,_ he thinks, _I can do this_.

“You can do this,” Richie had said that first time. “It’s like the diving board at the pool.”

“I don’t like that either, numb nuts.” He paced. “And at least the pool has chlorine. The shit that’s in that water - it’s like actual shit, you know?”

Bev was splashing below.

Bill elbowed him, grinning. “If you’re not g-going, I am.” And he threw himself off.

“Fuck you, Bill!” Richie called after him, “I wanted to be first.”

Bill hit the water. A beat, a moment where Eddie didn’t breathe, then he popped back up, swimming further into the quarry with Bev, beckoning them down.

Ben rushed past them and hurled himself off the ledge. Then Stan.

“See? Even Stan can do it,” Richie said. “Come on, Eds. You’re not chickenshit. Don’t let some girl show you up.” He had extended a hand, and Eddie remembers thinking, _I shouldn’t. Nothing about this is safe. Nothing about Richie is safe._ “Jump together?”

If Richie was diseased like his mom said, it was with something that caused a fever. He was always warm to the touch, emitting a heat that Eddie sidled closer to for years of his childhood. Subzero walks home from school and sleepovers in Stan’s chilly basement and winter fire drills in the schoolyard; and Richie was like a radiator or a space heater, giving off a sort of glow that wasn’t wholly temperature related. He was contagious, too. Eddie would feel his own face burn, his mouth dry, his internal temperature ratcheting up every time he caught Richie looking in his direction, radiating heat his way. Eddie noticed him staring so often that sometimes he wondered if Richie was trying to get caught, and when Eddie would let his mind wander long enough to ask why Richie was looking at him like that, he would need to clean the idea off of him, wipe the notion away with the Zest soap in the bathroom or the Lysol under the kitchen sink. Sanitary measures. _Wash your hands so you don’t get germs._

Because he didn’t want to get sick. Sicker than he already was.

Richie’s palm was hot and sweaty in the summer sun as they jumped into the quarry together.

_I can do this._

Eddie nears the edge of the boulder.

_Jump out, get as much momentum as possible. It’ll be fast, faster than waiting for sepsis or dehydration. Hope for a head injury, a substantial one. Instantaneous. Aim for the jagged rocks._

_Don’t think about what happens if I survive again. I can’t. I can’t just hang the fuck around when Richie is buried here._

A bang of a gong in a shitty Chinese restaurant. A voice that was at once familiar and completely foreign, and Eddie turned to him and thought, _I remember you. I remember everything about you. I remember more of you than I do myself_. Richie’s crappy jokes and how he’d just keep going with them until Eddie eventually laughed at his Goddamn commitment to whatever stupid shtick he was pulling, and the spark Eddie noticed in his eyes after he got a reaction from him; the exact sound his sneakers made on the side of the house as he climbed the drainpipe next to Eddie’s window on nights Eddie was panicking for _whatever reason it was that time_ , and later, long past midnight, the two of them under Eddie’s covers with Richie’s new Game Boy, struggling past World 4 of _Super Mario Land_ ; a party at Stan’s place in the summer after senior year, _the last summer_ , and Richie had leaned over him, his face a febrile red behind his glasses, and -

 _I think I’ve always remembered you. Even if the memories were gone, the idea of you stayed with me_ , he’d thought at the Jade, momentarily paralyzed.

Eddie steadies himself, the toes of his sneakers just past the ledge.

Richie wouldn’t want him to do this, he thinks. He’d said, “You’re braver than you think.”

He doesn’t feel brave, though. He feels desperate and disgusting. He feels _trapped_ like he has for most of his fucking life, trapped in a way he hadn’t realized the extent of until coming back to Derry and remembering it all: his mom and every needless, useless, abusive-as-fuck doctor’s appointment and all the bullshit anxiety that came with them. And now he’s trapped - literally trapped - in a cesspool of germs and _pathological_ thoughts that have fucked him up since he was a kid, like this was some kind of satirical, poetic punishment.

_Study your vocabulary words, Eddie Bear._

_Pathological, adj. 1. Relating to or dealing with disease; of or relating to the science of pathology. 2. Colloquially, of a person exhibiting a quality or trait to a degree considered extreme or psychologically unhealthy._

Richie had thought he was brave. Maybe he was right and Eddie was just too pathologically unhealthy to see that.

_Maybe._

_Richie had been right about a lot of things, the stupid idiot_. An almost inaudible whisper in a quiet corner of the backyard of Stan’s senior house party, over twenty years ago, “I think you want me too.” And Eddie had known he was right, even as he shook his head, pulling away.

He takes a wobbly step back from the edge and stares out over the glossy shards of It’s lair, glinting as they catch a thin trail of light from above. They almost sparkle, reflecting the light in little pearly dots across the bedrock like a disco ball or ghosting spots on an overexposed photo, like the faerie lights that glittered off of Richie’s oversized glasses on an especially sunny, summer afternoon, and Eddie idly watches as the incandescent shapes flicker across the far side of the cavern.

A crawlway catches his eye in the glinting light.

Small, barely wide enough for a person to fit into, Eddie decides. Low to the ground, partially covered by a boulder, but the entrance is there nonetheless. Water streams out of it.

_That water has to be coming from somewhere._

It’s probably nothing. It’s probably just a dead end with a break in the rock letting sewage flow in from the cistern above.

Eddie climbs down anyway, “You’re braver than you think,” looping in his head like a mantra as he swears at himself for being so naively stupid.

The water is waist-deep and rancid; the body of his shirt sticks to his abdomen, tacky with refuse and tinged a greenish brown from the dregs. He dodges something furry floating facedown, and somehow keeps from tripping over the uneven, rocky ground as he navigates across the length of the cavern.

Past avalanche-buried tunnels. Past the crushed lair ( _don’t think about Richie, don’t think about the others_ ). Past the crevasse he’d woken up under.

And finally the crawlway. The passage is incredibly narrow, but Eddie manages to squeeze by the boulder obscuring it. Hands and knees on wet, muddy terrain, Eddie hunches over in the dark of the tunnel and feels the walls. Earthen soil, and not large enough to proceed any way but through crawling. It’s an unseeable black void feet in front of him, and Eddie reaches out to feel a back wall, but there’s only empty space. A filthy stream of water flows down from some unknown source ahead.

High risk of a collapse, Eddie knows. It’s not reinforced; it’s probably a naturally occurring thoroughfare for the water from the cistern above, or maybe it’s something that shook loose because of the cave-in. Either way, it’s unstable and could bury him with any missteps.

Eddie looks back at the cavern. A lingering death or, worse, a lingering life down here. Jaw clenched, he climbs into the body of the tunnel and creeps forward into the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All data courtesy of the CDC and Mayo Clinic.
> 
> Talk to me on [Tumblr](https://spunknbite.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/spunknbite).


	2. Chapter 2

Eddie eases into the crawlway, lacerated hands hesitant on the soil. Still, he delicately presses his palms into the earth with every shift forward, feeling for weak spots that could house hazardous chasms below. Everything is so sodden with the flow of greywater that the soil is little more than mud, and he sinks down with every inch he takes, his sloughed palms slick with muck embedding itself into his open skin.

_Tetanus and botulism and blastomycosis and and and -_

_Hostile bacteria in a hostile place._

The limited light of the cavern is already distant only a few awkward shuffles in; ahead there is nothing but an unseeable void, and Eddie stretches his hand out into the emptiness for a guide or sense of direction. There is none, so he continues blindly, occasionally tracing the roof and sides of the tunnel to feel for bends and turns.

It’s a straight shot at a slight upwards incline, the sewage carried down the slope of the tunnel in a languid stream. In such a small space, the stench is overwhelming, and Eddie tucks his face into his chest to try and dampen it, but he smells just as foul as the detritus around him.

The drip of greywater amplifies and echoes across the length of the crawlway, roaring like rapids even though it’s little more than a steady trickle, and the sound of his heartbeat is heightened too, loud and tachycardic in his chest, palpitating wildly as Eddie tries not to obsess over its pace. The heart rate monitor on his watch is waterlogged, long past working after being submerged for so long.

_Calm the fuck down and keep going._

He doesn’t look back at the cavern where Richie is buried, as much as he wants to.

Forward. 

Forward.

Forward.

His scraped knees are numb from the mud, which is frigid despite the summer somewhere above him.

Eventually the slope evens out to a level plane, the darkness now all-consuming as he continues to crawl onward. It’s so dark that Eddie’s eyes won’t adjust to it, so dark that it makes no difference whether his eyes are open or closed, and Eddie briefly considers that maybe the tunnel is endless and just loops around the cisterns and sewers of Derry indefinitely, without any route out like some sort of warped M.C. Escher painting. A fucking funhouse maze.

And then suddenly he reels back in panic as his right hand sinks deep into the mud, whatever firm ground lay beneath the layers and layers of muck is gone, and he’s elbow-deep in the sludge and plummeting fast. Eddie recoils back several feet to a solid surface, shaking.

Edging forward to the pit again, he reaches over the initial drop and feels the surface past it for any underpinning of rock, but what he finds is only a slurry of wet mud of an unknown depth. The chasm takes up the width of the tunnel; no way past but through. In search of a bottom that must be there, surely, Eddie cautiously submerges his right arm - _what sort of creatures live in mud? Worms, obviously; forms of zooplankton too, but mostly microscopic bacteria, parasites, fungi, contagions, risks too small to assess_ \- and he stretches down past his elbow, then bicep, and still with his whole arm blanketed in the bog, there’s no solid foundation. His fingertips touch only bottomless mud.

_Fuck._

He can’t go back. He won’t let himself. He doesn’t even look.

Eddie retracts his arm and slides to the very edge of the rock, fingers skittering across the surface and holding fast to the jut of the precipice. A breath in then out. Then another. Then another. Clinging to the edge of the foundation like a small child to the side of a pool, he slips in.

Cold. It’s fucking freezing. The ache of it seizes him unexpectedly as he sinks to his chest, legs kicking down to find a bottom that isn’t there. His limbs are heavy in the thick mud; he shifts and his body reacts slowly, as if weighed down, leaden and cumbersome from both the viscosity and the temperature. Dragging himself to the side of the tunnel, he feels for a grip on the wall, but it’s soft and earthen, and chunks of soil come off of it as he fumbles for a handhold. 

He inches precariously forward, body swamped by the syrupy muck that tries to suck him down. Eddie scrambles against the wall of the tunnel, clutching to a deteriorating surface that crumbles away with each fresh grip, but he somehow manages to propel himself forward, hands reaching out for rock that must exist just beyond his fingertips, for _anything_ to steady himself on or anchor himself to. 

_Richie_. Hands that he could cling to that would cling back to his. That wouldn’t let him go. 

He thinks about holding onto Richie when they first saw the stupid fucking clown together in Bill’s garage, just kids then; about how sure he had been at that moment that they were about to die, and that if anything was going to save him it would somehow be because of Richie’s reassuringly solid deathgrip on his elbow. He thinks about Richie’s arm around him only hours ago in the tunnels. Bracing and firm, comforting in the midst of the fucking chaos. An almost brutal squeeze on Eddie’s forearm as Richie yanked him down another set of tunnels, and Eddie had thought _we’ll get through this; we did before._

Only Richie didn’t, not this time. 

Eddie pushes himself further into the mud, and doesn’t picture Richie dead under the boulder in the cavern. Here in the dark of the crawlway, it’s so easy to imagine.

Instead, he remembers decades ago: a hand against his cheek, cupping his face with an overt gentleness that Eddie had never known Richie to possess. And the way his fingers - long and broad, bigger than Eddie’s own - grasped the underside of Eddie’s chin was both apprehensive and desperate, Eddie had thought, like Richie expected his hand to be knocked away. The ambient noise of Stan’s senior party - the bass of the speakers, laughter and unintelligible conversation through the open backdoor, the clanking of a dropped can of beer off the deck - all of it faded as the world was nothing else other than Richie’s hand on his face and a whisper of, “I think you want me too.”

Eddie wishes he would have clung back.

Here, now, there’s nothing to cling to.

The mud laps the top of his shoulders, and he tilts his head up reflexively, kicking against the tunnel as he digs his blistered palms into the soil and pulls himself forward again, the wall shedding more earth. Desperate for momentum, Eddie kicks again and the force of it pulls him down deeper as he swims onward, the sludge covering his neck and slicking his chin.

He’s sinking further down.

He tastes the earth, his mouth slipping briefly under the surface. It’s iron-rich and foul, reeking of both cleaning materials - shampoos and laundry powder and dishwasher detergent, the stuff of greywater - and the dirt they washed away. And it’s almost gelatinous, frothy and cold, and the taste of it - no, the prospect of _drowning_ in the taste of it, of having his lungs and trachea filled with it until he aspirates - that prospect sends a wave of nauseous terror over him.

Eddie fights the dragging weight of the mud and kicks frantically to try and keep his head above, but his legs are sluggish and the movement only seems to pull him down faster. A flood of muck in his mouth as he’s pulled down again, and Eddie swallows involuntarily, sputtering.

 _Don’t let me drown. Please, don’t let me drown._ Pleading with someone unknown, someone long absent.

The mud swims up his nostrils as he’s pulled under.

His head is fully submerged and Eddie knows he has a minute, max. Probably less given how exhausted he already is from fighting the mud. Once the first inhale comes - involuntarily, _hypercapnia_ , the body’s last, misguided attempt at keeping itself alive - it’ll be over soon after. It will burn when he aspirates, probably worse than with water given the contents of greywater and sewage, and soon after he’ll lose consciousness. Then brain death. Then cardiac arrest. Then he’ll rot at the bottom of this cesspool, decompose and become part of the filth that’s consumed him.

_Assuming I can die still. What if I’m trapped under -_

_Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck._

A manic kick and he mercifully finds rock underfoot. Eddie kicks off of it as hard as he can manage and pushes up, arms cutting through the sludge.

He has no vantage point, no sense of direction, but still everything tilts, spins like a circus ride as his lungs beg for air.

_Don’t inhale. Don’t inhale. Don’t fucking inhale._

His body burns with the need to breathe.

_Is this up? Or is this down?_

The pain seems distant - the slime, the cold, the sharp ache in his chest at the thought that _Richie is dead_ \- all of that melts away, reduced to a fuzzy, white haze as his brain starts to shut down.

_This is what it feels like before you die. This is what it felt like when I died before._

His hand brushes the surface of the mud somewhere that must be above him, and he manages a kick in that direction.

Eddie breaks the surface with a stuttered, choking gasp. His arms splash up, treading, flailing as he’s dragged down again.

Rock.

Steady, solid rock just beyond his fingertips.

Eddie scrambles against it, hands grasping the edge as he pries himself out of the swamp and onto foundation again. His legs feel so heavy that he can barely lug them out, and he lays with his torso out, legs still submerged, wheezing for air and coughing up the mud slicking his mouth.

When he closes his eyes (or are they still open?), he almost sees Richie and thinks _fuck, I was such a coward_.

*

Eddie’s mom used to watch _Geraldo_ a lot. There was also _Oprah_ and _Donahue_ and _Sally_ , but mostly Eddie remembers the opening synth chords of _Geraldo_ as the titular man jogged out from behind the applauding audience, waving and nodding as he walked towards the stage amidst a crest of static across the pixelated screen. “Oh, you’re going to love this one! Hey, how you doing? Looking good, looking good there,” he‘d say, face turned away from the oversized mic in his palm, shaking hands and clapping backs with his free hand. A large smile shadowed by a larger moustache. A stray brush of thickly moussed hair. More cheers. A shudder of white-noised snow across the screen again and Geraldo was briefly gone, succumbed to lambent static, only to flicker back in color, face wavering and distorted as the signal cleared. “Thanks, thanks everybody.” Geraldo walked to his mark among the audience to deliver the opening spiel, eyes finally finding the camera, and even from the other side of the living room wall - Eddie leaning back in the kitchen chair as he doodled over his algebra homework - Eddie could envision the scene in the adjoining room.

Mom stretched out on the sofa with a soda. The folding tray table propped open beside her, supporting a bottle of separated nail polish and an emery board. _Geraldo_ was always accompanied by the smell of his mom’s nail polish - pharmacy-bought Cutex in a fluorescent pink called Hawaiian Orchid - and Eddie thought it smelled like solvent, like something from the glue factory outside of Dexter, and the stink of it seemed to drag up into his olfactory nerves and linger there, industrial and carcinogenic. He’d grab his binder and textbook then climb the stairs to his room to a call of “I want that homework done before comics.”

Occasionally though, she’d call him down mid-flight. “Eddie, you should watch this, sweetheart,” and Eddie would turn around and tramp back down the stairs, knowing it wasn’t a request he could decline.

Geraldo addressed the camera as Eddie sank down on the sofa next to his mom, homework discarded.

“Well here they are, the people at the center of the recent debacle at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. You’ve all seen the clips on the news?” An assenting murmur from the audience. “That’s right, everyone’s seen the videos by now. A staged ‘die-in’ during mass, and thousands of affiliated protesters demonstrating outside of the cathedral. All of this as a condemnation of Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor’s well-publicized stance against the teaching of safe sex education in New York City public schools.” Geraldo briefly paused as the camera cut to a middle-aged, curly-haired woman in the audience, shaking her head at the people on the stage, lips pursed. Cut back to Geraldo. “Here’s Larry Kramer, author and founder of ACT UP, the organization responsible for the protest.”

The first of several people lined up on chairs on the stage, Kramer was balding and lightly stubbled with salt and pepper flecks across his face; round glasses perched on his nose, his lips downturned at Geraldo’s already antagonistic tone, Eddie remembers thinking, shifting on the sofa away from his mother. Kramer sported a black sweater with a pink triangle and the words _silence = death_ printed under it.

Eddie felt his mother watching him for a reaction. 

Geraldo took a few casual steps towards the stage. “Mr. Kramer, I have to ask. Why take your political views to the church? Why interrupt a peaceful service?”

Kramer straightened up in his chair, eyes narrowed. “We’re ten years into an epidemic. We’re with our second president that doesn’t give a damn. We’ve tried quiet negotiations. We’ve tried civil conversations. We've tried to work within the system. There’s a new AIDS death every half hour. We’ve been forced into this position. We are dying, and the audacity of the church to insist that condoms won’t protect people - ” Kramer sighed, closed his eyes, and Eddie thought maybe he was trying to rephrase something, pull back from whatever it was that he had been planning on saying. “The church’s position is only leading to more deaths and the further spread of HIV.”

A shudder, feverish and sickly, rolled down Eddie’s back like a wave of static over the television.

A contagion; endemic, infectious, catching, like the virus was sentient somehow, reaching out for new hosts to suck the life out of. HIV was a retrovirus, Eddie knew from the news reports. Retroviruses were marked by genome insertion; the virus implanted a copy of its own genetic material into the DNA of the host, invading and infecting, turning the host’s own cells against it. Like one of Richie’s shitty horror flicks - _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ , but on a cellular level. Alien invaders. Genetic parasites. Sleeper cells. Manchurian fucking candidates.

For years his mom had come home from work with stories from old nursing school acquaintances in Bangor or Boston or New York. Stories of non-healing lesions that remained open and cankering, requiring bandage changing long after they should have closed and scabbed; bruises that darkened and spread instead of fading; mouth sores and thrush so severe that patients couldn’t eat or drink on their own, and had to be hooked up to feeding tubes and drips; blistered sarcomas that appeared as if out of nowhere to bubble and fester over paper-thin skin; shitting and pissing and puking until there was nothing left, no more fluid to possibly expel, and the people were just dried up, wrinkled husks; patients admitted only to die days later in quarantine, _alone_.

Eddie wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans and tried to focus just above the television, tried to listen to the dizzying buzz in his ears, to the hum of the television’s static, to anything instead of whatever Larry Kramer was saying now.

“Are you paying attention, Eddie Bear?”

Eddie nodded automatically.

His mom uncapped her nail polish and the smell seized him - synthetic and chemical - and it was sharp, not only like the smell of Dexter’s glue factory, but also something similar to hospital antiseptic. It was the smell of the nursing station in the palliative care ward his mom worked in, where Eddie spent several days every year. Spinning in the rotating office chairs on PA days when he was too young to stay home by himself and his mom wouldn’t trust any of the nearby teenage babysitters to supervise him, he’d spin and spin while holding his breath and watching the tick of the second hand, fighting an inhale. The overly bleached scent of the ward burned not only his nose but the back of his throat, caustic like an acid, and Eddie remembers finding a lonely stairway where he could breathe better, holing up on a landing with a small rubber ball, bouncing it off the wall as he wondered what Richie and the others were up to.

It must be what AIDS wards smelled like too, Eddie thought while looking away from Kramer, still struggling to swallow and suddenly aware of the saliva in his mouth, the smooth, unscarred surface of his gums and tongue, lesion-free. AIDS wards would have to be cleaned and bleached to kill the virus that must have infiltrated every surface, poisoning dirty bandages and bedsheets and discarded latex gloves and IV needles; the whole place would reek of disinfectant that could only mask the rotting flesh so much.

Eddie fought a gag.

“I know it’s upsetting,” his mom said, her hand now clutching the back of Eddie’s neck, her freshly sharpened nails digging into his skin. “Blaming the church for their own behavior; it’s sickening. And they expect _us_ to care for them when they brought this on themselves?”

 _Isn’t that your job?_ He remembers thinking, but he didn’t dare say it. Instead he looked back to the television.

Geraldo was speaking to one of the others on the panel - a short-haired woman with tired eyes. “The Cardinal’s position on homosexual behaviour is traditional to the beliefs of the church, but in your view that’s homophobic somehow?” He asked.

The woman frowned. “It’s not only that but it provokes violence against gay people. We just had a gay man killed on Staten Island - ”

His mom cracked open her soda. “It’s modern leprosy,” she said, not for the first time. An old refrain. “The Old Testament associated leprosy with sin, and _this_ ,” she gestured to the television, “is no different.”

_Gay plague. That’s what they used to call it before they named it AIDS._

Blood and cum and disgusting, internal fluids. _Intimate contact_ , his mother had explained once, “This is why we keep clean, why we don’t touch ill people. They sweat diseases. It drips out of their pores, sweetheart; it's in their saliva. You don’t want to risk it. You don’t want to risk ending up like that,” she’d said sometime after Eddie turned ten, flipping through a copy of _American Journal of Nursing_ she’d taken home from the hospital. She stopped on a photo of a frail-looking man dressed in an over-large hospital gown that draped loosely over bone-thin arms and pronounced collarbones, his skin borderline translucent even in black and white print. Several smaller photos detailed rashes across his back, putrefying and oozing the virus. “This is why you have to keep safe,” she’d told him, holding him to the spot as he tried to flinch away from the photo.

 _Risk reduction_ , Eddie thought as he watched Larry Kramer bristle at a question from an elderly woman in the audience. 

_It all came back to that._

Years later, after finishing his second Master’s and landing a job at State Farm, Eddie learned that in the insurance business risk reduction techniques equated to loss mitigation, or strategies to reduce an insurance company’s potential financial losses. They were measures built into insurance policies that were designed to prevent actualizing risks, and thus decrease the chances of a payout; requirements for property owners covered for theft and vandalism to install a security system, for example, or for insured workplaces to upgrade their safety standards to reduce the chance of worker accidents.

In life, risk reduction was about avoidance, minimizing the statistical probabilities of adverse outcomes. _Don’t jump off of rocks into polluted quarry water. Don’t shimmy down the drainpipe and run across town on cold winter nights to hang out with your friends when your mom thinks you’re in bed with the flu. Don’t go into the sewer to take on demonic clown aliens._

And things too risky to even contemplate: _don’t let Richie know you see him looking. Don’t think about why he’s looking._

Because thoughts are sickly too. 

_Don’t repeat gay plague over and over in your head until it’s lost all meaning._

_Don’t spend an afternoon at the library looking up leprosy to see if it’s a retrovirus (it’s not) and whether any researchers have linked it to HIV and AIDS (they haven’t)._

_Don’t think about the sort of people who could infect you._

_Don’t think about Richie._

*

Eddie’s not sure how long he stays prone on the floor of the tunnel before forcing his legs out of the mud. Maybe he passed out. He’s too drained to tell.

His limbs ache, still heavy and weighed down by the layers of sludge now caked onto his clothes. Moving is a struggle, as if he’s still trapped under the mud. One knee under him, then another. Heavy breaths. Hands back to the surface of the crawlway. A shuffle, then one more. The only way is forward. He manages to get up onto his knees and support his weight, unsteady.

Mud still coats his mouth no matter how much he spits.

He presses on slowly, the tunnel inclining again, although how steeply Eddie can’t determine. The world is still off its axis, his point of balance uncertain and wavering; every few feet forward his equilibrium shifts violently and he collapses on an arm, the tunnel seeming to roll one way and then another, to spin forward and back until it’s almost completely inverted, and Eddie can only rest his forehead on the cold, wet dirt of the ground and wait the tremor out before pushing onward again. It makes no difference that he can’t _see_ the spinning in the darkness; he feels it just the same.

 _Brain damage_ , he tries not to think.

 _Vertigo,_ he repeats to himself instead. _Caused by an inner ear fluid imbalance from when I was pulled under._

_Probably._

He’s numb to the cold now; his knees and palms have lost most sensations aside from the occasional painful jab of sharp rock scraping already shredded flesh. When another round of vertigo hits, he feels the true chill of the dirt against his cheek as he lays it against the ground.

His bandaged cheek, no longer bandaged apparently. It must have come off in the mud. Eddie brushes it with the pads of his fingers while the tunnel rolls around him, and he feels the warmth of the blood dripping down from the slit in his cheek, feels the crusty streaks dried to his jaw and down his neck.

Eddie’s too tired to mentally list all of the types of bacteria currently pooling there; he can only focus on riding out the vertigo without puking.

The spinning stops and he continues.

The crawlway narrows. Eddie shimmies on his side, angled so that one leg is atop of the other as he worms forward awkwardly, his shoulders twisted painfully in the tight space that can hardly accommodate him. Narrower and narrower still, and as Eddie reaches down the tunnel with one hand, he feels the crawlway come to an abrupt end.

A wave of nausea unrelated to the vertigo hits him. 

Shaking, he desperately feels the sides of the crawlway for anything: an adjoining offshoot he somehow missed despite how he’s touching both sides in the narrow space, or a weak point perhaps, somewhere hollow that might lead to another tunnel. _Anything_.

There’s nothing. Just a dead end.

Eddie curls in on himself, head tucked against his knees, and he hopes the sepsis will be fast, sped along by potential hypothermia and maybe some aspirated mud.

*

When he passes out, he dreams about Richie.

About a party he hadn’t wanted to attend the summer after senior year. Stan had found himself other friends somewhere amidst all of the clubs he had joined to pad out his college application - school council, debate, mock trial, and his especially stupid _birdwatching club_ that he’d started only because he thought putting himself down as the founder of something would boost his shot at the better schools, and which had inexplicably managed to attract two other members - and so Eddie found himself at a blowout that actually looked legit, and not like the embarrassingly low-turnout parties he was used to. _Losers_ , after all.

It was _the last summer_ and that alone made the party depressing, despite the mix tapes Richie had recorded the previous night with Soundgarden and Hole and The Offspring and every other too-cool rock band Richie worshipped now blaring over Stan’s dad’s surround-sound stereo, and despite the total absence of Stan’s parents and the total abundance of both beer and of last-days-of-our-youth-desperation worn by short-skirted popular girls ready to make a memory. 

But the group was scattering in only short days and the party marked the end of _everything_ \- the _Losers_ , their friendship, the people that Eddie relied on, _Richie_ \- and so Eddie gulped down a beer and wondered where they’d all end up, swallowing morosely.

He’d thought, _I’m being a melodramatic princess for getting sentimental_ , but in retrospect he’d got it about right.

“Seen Richie?” He asked, passing by Bill who was failing at impressing a redhead with some AP English poetry bullshit.

“Smoking on the patio, l-last I saw,” Bill said.

Of course.

It was a cool late August night and only a few others were in the backyard. Richie was situated on a lonely corner of the patio by the bend of the house, leaning against the brick with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other.

Just a little drunk, Eddie remembers. Richie smiled a little too widely, waved his arm in greeting a little too openly. A small stumble back into the brick. Barely noticeable, but Eddie saw because he saw everything about Richie. He couldn’t hold alcohol for shit. His glasses were askew. 

Eddie smiled back, feeling a warmth he didn’t dare contemplate, a fondness for the drunken idiot that he would never cop to.

“Those will give you cancer,” he’d said in lieu of hello.

Richie exhaled smoke opposite of Eddie’s direction. “Your mom can take care of me in my final days. Some hot nurse action.” He stubbed out the freshly-lit cigarette on the side of the house. “Oh, Nurse Kaspbrak, you want me to bend over to check my temperature - ”

“Fuck off,” but Eddie was laughing. 

“When did Stan get friends that weren’t us?” Richie asked, nodding at the packed house. “Dude should have told me sooner when there was still time to get with some of these chicks. Did you see Lisa Martinelli dancing in there? Fuck me.”

“There’s still time.”

“Nah. Feels kind of pointless with only a week before I drive out.”

California. A year and a half at UCLA before he dropped out to focus on standup, Richie had told him over dinner at the Jade. At the time though, the plan had been theater studies.

The impending distance hung between them, a country-length across, and Richie toyed with his lighter, flicking it on and off idly at his side. The vibration from the bass rocked the nighttime air.

“You still sure about UMaine?” Richie finally asked.

Eddie nodded, leaning against the wall beside him. “It’s strong in the sciences. Solid pre-med.”

“So are lots of schools.”

“It’s practical.”

“UCLA has a good biology program.”

“Richie - ”

A too casual grin, and Richie elbowed him, their forearms touching. Eddie felt the hair on his arms prickle at heat off of Richie’s body. “Did I tell you? I got my room assignment, and my roommate’s name is Abner. Abner. What kind of a person is named Abner? He must be over eighty. I can use him as a primary source for all of my history papers.” One of Richie’s eyebrows raised conspiratorially. “Or, we can kick ol’ Abner out and then you could move in instead, is what I’m saying. History grades be damned.” 

“Richie - ” Eddie began, but didn’t finish.

Everything was quiet as Richie stared across the yard.

His eyes were hardened behind his glasses when he looked back at Eddie. “It’s fucked up that you’re staying so close, man. You don’t want to be here in Derry. You’re better than this.”

“I’m not staying in Derry.”

“UMaine isn’t far. You need to put more space between you and here.”

“I’ve made up my mind.”

Another pause, then, angrily, softly, vulnerable like Richie with his stupid bravado never was, “I’m going to miss you.”

Eddie felt his pulse quicken, and he told himself it was just because of the beer. “Yeah, Rich, but it’s not like we won’t see each other again.” Lies. One year after this conversation Eddie would barely remember him; Richie would be just an outline of a person he hardly recalled from childhood, no more significant than any of the near-strangers at the party.

Richie finished his beer, and Eddie watched as his fingers briefly traced the lip of the bottle before he set it down on the patio, his expression unreadable. “You’re a stubborn asshole, you know that, Eds? You’re fucking impossible.”

“So are you, shit for brains.” It came out harsher than Eddie intended.

“I’m serious. You’re such a Goddamn moron. You’re thicker than your mother.”

“Fuck you,” and Eddie turned to leave, but Richie’s hand caught him by the wrist and pulled him back against the brick of the house.

Richie was shaking as he held him there, leaning over him with his full height. “After everything we’ve been through here, all of the bullshit bullying and day-in-day-out torture by Bowers and his gang, and the fucking waking nightmare that was ‘89 and the clown and fuck,” Richie slammed his fist against the wall by Eddie’s head, “the clown and the sewer and Jesus fucking Christ, Eds, you could have died in that kitchen on Neibolt when It had you.” Richie lowered his voice, suddenly aware they weren’t the only two in the backyard. “And your mother. Fuck, I know I joke, but she is so incredibly fucked in the head. But after all of that, after everything this shit hole of a town has done, you don’t want to fucking flee the state? Mike is psycho for staying, and you’re not any better. You go to UMaine, you’ll be back here in no time, Eds.”

His face was flushed, burned up with a fever, febrile and hot and contagious, and Eddie felt warm in proximity.

“You don’t need to worry about me.”

Richie squeezed his eyes shut and he seemed caught between laughing and crying. “Ever since the fucking clown all I do is worry about you. Don’t you fucking get it?”

Eddie understood. He always had, but he’d never opened his mouth to admit it, never let what was so fucking obvious sink in deep enough that he could really, truly feel it. Because -

_Risk reduction._

So he said nothing. Like always.

Richie’s hand cupped his face, uncharacteristically soft, especially given the resentment still in his eyes. And if Eddie pressed into the touch it was surely unintentional - the beer or the adrenaline from the argument or the emotion of parting with everyone - and not because the thought of Richie touching him like this was something that sparked a fever in his cheeks and low-grade, nauseated flutters in his lower stomach. Not because sometimes he dreamed about Richie touching him like this with a sort of easy, familiar intimacy that wasn’t their own but maybe _could have been_ if the world was different, and then he’d wake up sweating and aching and guilty.

“I want you so fucking much, Eds.” Barely a whisper, but Eddie heard it over the blood pounding in his ears. “I think you want me too.”

Who had kissed who? Had Richie leaned down or had Eddie stretched up? Or had they met somewhere between?

Whichever, Richie’s hands were in his hair, one threaded through the locks just behind his earlobe, the other stroking the light hairs on the nape of his neck. And Eddie didn’t know what to do with this hands, didn’t know whether to push Richie away or pull him closer, so he settled them around his waist instead, fingers grasping the comforting fabric of Richie’s t-shirt. Like when they were kids sharing a bike, Eddie digging his nails into Richie’s sides as they flew downhill. He felt like he was tumbling now. 

Richie’s mouth was warm like the rest of him. He tasted like beer and smoke and something else altogether that Eddie thought he could get lost in, trying to pinpoint what it was exactly. 

And Eddie could tell that Richie was equally as unsure of what they were doing as he himself was. The clumsiness of their lips, the awkward crook of Eddie’s neck as they shifted to find a better angle, the frenetic hammering of Richie’s pulse in his neck - none of that mattered because it was _Richie_ and so it was good. It felt good; it felt fucking amazing like everything he’d never let himself consciously want even if the _want_ had always been there, unexamined and needy. And even if everything in his head yelled _bad_ and _wrong_ and _sick_ , Eddie still reflexively tightened his grip on Richie’s waist and pulled Richie forward into him so that Eddie was pinned against the brick of the house, Richie’s body flush with his. 

Full body contact, and Eddie was simultaneously protected and threatened.

A swipe of a tongue against Eddie’s closed lips and - _fuck_ \- Richie’s tongue was against his own, Richie’s mouth was open to his, and everything was hot and wet, and _fucking Christ that feels good._

Wet, though. Wet with saliva, spit, sputum. _Bodily fluids_. Pathogens. Contagions. Viruses.

The sort of endemic shit he was susceptible to. 

_Don’t repeat gay plague over and over in your head until it’s lost all meaning._

Eddie pushed him back, hard. Richie’s glasses were still askew, and Eddie wanted nothing more than to either straighten them or punch them off his stupid face; he wasn’t sure which.

His mouth was still tingling.

“I’m not a - ”

“Eds?”

“Fuck off,” he insisted. “I’m not a - ”

“You’re not - ” Richie couldn’t say it either. They’d heard it enough from Bowers.

“Fuck no.”

He saw through the anger on Richie’s face to the heartbreak, and he knew that Richie must see through him too; he must realize how transparently bullshit Eddie’s words were.

“Whatever,” Richie said with a sort of exaggerated indifference. “Don’t come to L.A., that’s fine. Just get the hell out of Derry. Get the fuck away from your mom. You can do better than all this. You deserve better.”

And Richie was gone. Gone from the party. Gone from Derry, from Maine. Soon after, gone from Eddie’s memory completely. Gone until years later Eddie looked across a cheap Chinese restaurant and remembered an entire childhood and adolescence of shameful want.

*

Water wakes him up. A steady splash, a _drip drip drip_ of something on his forehead.

Eddie blinks open his eyes to the darkness and reaches above him to find the source. The enclosed tunnel surrounds him, and Eddie traces the tight sides up and overhead until he feels it.

Or rather, he doesn’t feel it. Directly overhead, there’s a breach in the soil, an opening that allows a drizzle of greywater to stream down.

He can hardly maneuver to his knees, the space is so confined, but he presses his back against on side of the crawlway’s wall and shimmies up, squeezing his shoulders into the narrow passage above.

The vertical shaft is rock, jagged and hard and slick with the flowing greywater, but it’s still scalable, he thinks. Scalable if there was any light source, of course, which there isn’t. He reaches up as far as he can manage and the tunnel continues upwards past the tips of his fingers. Bracing himself against both rock walls, he struggles to his feet, fighting a sudden wave of vertigo.

 _Get the hell out of Derry_ , Richie had said. _You deserve better_.

With a hand steadier than he feels, Eddie hauls himself up and onto the rock face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Larry Kramer's dialogue is taken from a number of interviews he did around the St. Patrick's demonstrations.
> 
> Talk to me on [Tumblr](https://spunknbite.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/spunknbite).


	3. Chapter 3

Slowly, so slowly in the all-consuming dark, Eddie shifts up the vertical channel, searching for handholds and footholds one limb at a time while keeping the others stationary, his hands and the toes of his sneakers locked into little juts and grooves embedded in the jagged rock. His fingers splay over the rock face for a safe position, testing each potential spot before committing any weight to it.

 _Christ._ He bites his lip as the water-sloughed skin on the pads of his fingers peel off on the sharp crags. The wetness he feels on their tips - greywater off the rocks, mud, or blood, ripped away layers of epidermis exposing the vascular system and the fine dorsal veins that run up each digit - he isn’t sure which it is, but his fingers are so raw and slick that it _must_ be blood, at least partially.

Numbness across his hands; an electric tingling sensation like they’ve fallen asleep from disuse and need to be shaken awake, but he keeps on.

His hold slips but the rock is forgiving, solid and steady so far, and he recovers his grip. Mercifully, his sneakers’ treads are still functioning, despite how waterlogged they are, and the narrow width of the channel allows for a relatively sturdy foothold, all things considered.

Still Eddie wishes he could see _anything_ , even faintly, while climbing up into a void with no sense of where the channel stops or leads, or whether it’s entirely pointless, another dead end, an enclosed grave to rot in.

 _This must go somewhere_ , he thinks. _The greywater has to be coming from something, some source._

_Please._

It hits without warning - the vertigo - and Eddie closes his eyes even though it makes no difference, clinging to the wall and pressing his good cheek onto a patch of smooth rock as the channel flips violently around him. It swings turbulently like a carnival ride, like something Richie would have dragged him on once, and even as he feels his equilibrium shifting and his brain signalling to move his weight back to compensate - his whole body seems to scream _lean back, let go to keep from falling_ \- but he knows it’s a trick of the vertigo and so he stays steady against the rock, fighting motion sickness and trying to keep his staccato breathing even.

_Don’t hyperventilate. Don’t lower your carbon dioxide levels. Your blood vessels will narrow and you won’t get enough blood to the brain. You’ll fall and it’ll be done, over._

The vertigo lasts and lasts, and his arms seize in their awkward position, frozen to the rock.

_What am I even climbing towards? What the fuck is even the point of all of this?_

A marriage that was dead in the water before the rings were exchanged. His shoebox of a New York City apartment, crammed full of Myra’s candles and Royal Doulton figurines and bullshit new-age books, his own things having been casually stripped away until one day he woke up, looked around, and realized this place wasn’t even _his_ anymore. A job that was only tolerable so much as it got him out of the house. A social life that consisted of work functions and overnight business trips with people he didn’t care enough about to bother to get to know outside of their Monday morning meetings.

If the emptiness of it all had ever seemed _okay_ , well, it certainly didn’t once he remembered the others, and once he saw Richie.

The memories had sideswiped him all at once when Mike called; they had been faded and blurry, soft around the edges, but with enough shape and definition that they exceeded the sparse recollections of before the phone call: a group of friends he inherently trusted above everyone else, summers at the quarry and hours in front of _Street Fighter_ next to Richie and sleepovers and recesses and lunchroom bullshitting and hovering over all of that was an indistinct, ominous threat that remained nameless until they’d discussed It together at the restaurant.

But it was only when Richie walked into the Jade, trailing Bev and Ben, that Eddie remembered _everything_ . Years of uncomfortable flushes and butterflies he dismissed as illnesses; a stolen glance to find Richie already looking at him; half-conscious, nighttime reveries at sleepovers in Richie’s bedroom as the backs of their arms inadvertently brushed in a shared twin bed; and a too-short, broken kiss that solidified everything Eddie had always known about himself, even if he refused to admit it. And as Eddie had fought to breathe - to keep his already frayed composure together as an adolescence of forgotten _want_ rushed over him - Richie had banged some stupid, oversized gong while looking white-knuckledly, determinedly nonchalant and easygoing, like this all wasn’t some surreal hallucination and instead just a normal dinner with childhood friends he’d remembered for longer than a few days. But Eddie saw through the breezy act, like he always had with Richie. He saw the clenched jaw and the eye twitch, how his folded, defensive arms betrayed his nerves, the way he looked over at Eddie with a sort of uncertainty that didn’t suit him.

“So wait, Eddie, you got married?” Richie had asked, easy as anything, just another joke, another laugh among hundreds. As if a kiss didn’t hang over their last meeting decades past. 

_You have to remember_ , Eddie had thought.

And if Richie’s follow up, “What, to like a woman?” seemed a little accusatory, an unsaid insinuation alight behind thick glasses, it was enough to confirm the shared memory for Eddie, enough to see that Richie was thinking about it too. Richie hadn’t baited him any further, though. Relaxed facade back up, joking with Eddie again like nothing had passed between them.

Eddie played along because it was the easy thing to do. And he’d always opted for the easy choice, the path of least resistance. 

_Risk reduction. A broken kiss. UMaine. Myra._

_Richie had been risky then_ , he’d thought, face deep in wine. _Now, too._

What Eddie didn’t say, there at the Jade or in the following hours before they descended back into Neibolt: I remember wanting to kiss you well before Stan’s party. Even if I never let myself sit with those feelings, they’d always been there from the start. I shouldn’t have pushed you away. I should have held on, in every way. I think I regretted losing you even after I forgot you, somehow. I should have gone with you to California, even though the bumper of your old-ass Ford was stuck on with duct tape and the AC was busted. I should have gone with you anywhere. 

_And now you’re dead._

_No second chance, no Goddamn do over._

Eddie doesn’t want to go home to his stale life, and now the only people he ever really cared about - the only people who cared about him in return - they’re gone. _Why the fuck am I still even trying?_

 _You deserve better_ , Richie had said decades ago. Maybe that wasn’t just about getting the fuck away from Derry. But about moving past all of his crap.

So much fucking crap. The anxiety and the coping mechanisms that he knows are fucked up but at least they get him to the level of functional adult and the pathological germ nonsense and the insecurity - no, be fucking real - the homophobic bullshit that has derailed his entire fucking life. Crap, all of it.

_And I’m stuck in the sewers. Irony is a bitch._

The vertigo slows, the worst of the spinning subsides, and Eddie waits a few more moments to be sure it’s over before maneuvering up again, his right hand searching for another safe inlet to transition to. He finds one above his head, a deep, solid crevasse wide enough to anchor both his hands to, and he shimmies up, feet braced across the width of the channel.

Another transition up. Again and again, for long minutes, and the greywater coming from somewhere overhead intensifies without warning. It’s now a heavy downpour, splattering over his head and shoulders, running through his eyebrows and into his lashes. Eddie tucks his head down and waits for the flow of the water to cease, but it continues on without letting up, cold and stinking of garbage and sewage.

He stretches his arm up into the water, seeking another hold; if the water won’t stop, he’ll just have to move through it. The rock is slick, almost slimy with mucus-like strands of _something_ , and his finger skitter across the edges as he loses his grip, wobbling precariously back before recovering his position with blunted, bleeding fingers.

“Fuck,” he swears into nothingness, his hands burning.

Keeping his face turned downwards, pressed into his chest, Eddie climbs up through the deluge.

*

“What happened to pre-med?” Richie had asked over fried wontons. 

The room around him buzzed from the wine. “Not good for the anxiety,” Eddie answered, more candidly than he should have. The decision to transfer out to stats had been less about the time management impossibilities of his course load - what he’d told his mother and the few others who asked - and more because every disease he studied, every bacteria and pathogen and virus he read about always led to the nauseating question _will this be what kills me_? And a glimpse at the DSM made his stomach churn and pulse race.

_I didn’t want to study how fucked up I am._

Richie’s eyes were sympathetic, perceptive. “Dr. Kaspbrak seems like he would have been a real pill anyway,” he said. “Nurse Kaspbrak on the other hand - ” Eddie flipped him off and Richie only laughed, nodding to a bowl of hot sauce to Eddie’s left. 

Eddie passed it over. “I still attended long enough to tell you that eating out of a bowl that Bill has been double dipping into the whole evening is a great way to get whatever the hell Bill has going on.” They glanced over to see Bill gesturing a little drunkenly at Mike. “Mono and Herpes-1 and Hep B and C, not to mention Strep and Rhinovirus and - ”

“You think stuttering is contagious?” Richie asked, making a show of dipping his entire wonton into the sauce.

Eddie snorted into his wine and Richie seemed to light up at his reaction, smiling broadly in that stupid, goofy way Eddie only just then remembered.

 _I missed you_ , he’d thought. _I didn’t know it, but I missed you._

*

The downpour of greywater gets heavier the further he climbs. It soaks the stone, making it slick with soap and something frothy that Eddie doesn’t want to identify. The water is fetid, reeking and viscous, and no matter how he hides his face in his chest, it’s still everywhere, running over his eyelids and up into his nostrils, over chalky, chapped lips. Eddie sputters through it and focuses on keeping his hands locked to the rock.

 _It has to be a lethal height if I fall now, well over four storeys._ The channel stretches up and up, and Eddie follows it, trying not to think of the plummet that threatens below. _If I survive the fall, it’ll be a spinal break; probably compound, open fractures too, bones through the skin, a broken neck, paralysis. I’d be trapped until I bleed out._

Eddie tightens his hold.

At last he stretches up, hand looking for another groove, but the rock ends abruptly in a jutting ledge over him. He feels a metallic lip overhanging the ledge - man-made, corrugated and ridged, with a round curve on the underside - an oversized drainage pipe of some kind, he thinks. It’s spewing the greywater into the channel below him, the putrid liquid falling over the edge like a fermenting, soiled waterfall.

Eddie scrambles up through the crest of the sewage, fingers finding a firm hold on the metal before hauling himself into the pipe, past the heavy stream intent on pushing him back. His already torn knees scrape the sharp lip as he pulls his legs up, tearing his jeans further and breaking the sensitive skin; the ridges of the pipe hook into his shredded knees, and Eddie cries out weakly, gritting his teeth as he dislodges himself from the serrated metal.

The current is strong, and Eddie grips the sides of the pipe to keep steady as he edges further into it, feeling the width with his hands. The pipe is at a gentle incline and large enough for him to stand up in, stooped. In the far distance - can he _see_ the distance now? - is a pinprick of light. Barely there, too far to illuminate anything near him, but visible nonetheless like a distant star. 

*

Pre-dawn light sparkled just below the horizon as Eddie watched from the steps of the inn; a hazy orange glow shone out over the flat farmland that surrounded the town, and from his perch atop the inn’s uppermost step, Eddie saw the burgeoning light peek out furtively behind a distant silo. Mike and Bill paced on the street below, talking; Ben and Bev were upstairs getting some things before they all left for Mike’s proposed trip to the Barrens. And Richie - Richie nudged him from behind with the side of his sneaker.

“Move over, asshole, you’re taking up the whole step,” Richie had said, lightly, sitting down next to him.

Eddie shifted over.

“How the fuck are we going to do this?” Eddie asked into the quiet morning air.

“We managed it last time, and we were just kids then.”

“Except we didn’t, apparently.”

“It’ll be okay,” Richie said immediately, voice too even, deliberately calm. Eddie wasn’t sure he believed him, or his tone. Fuck, Richie didn’t look like he believed himself, but Eddie still appreciated the gesture.

Eddie turned to him, following the emerging sunlight as it reflected off the lenses of his glasses. “Bullshit and you know it,” he said, half-heartedly. Richie only shrugged. “And honestly that sort of dismissive attitude is really counterproductive to emergency preparedness tenets.”

Richie quirked an eyebrow, a small smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. “You wrote those yourself, I’m assuming?” He asked, pseudo-innocently.

“Fuck off, man.”

“No, no,” Richie elbowed him. “I can tell you want you give me a spiel. Go for it. I missed your rants.”

 _I missed your everything,_ he thought again, trying not to.

Eddie exhaled. “We have to assume the worst. It’s the only way to be prepared for it. We need a plan.”

“I think Mike has one.”

“I mean we need a backup plan. A worst case scenario, shit has hit the fan, escape plan for when it all goes to hell.”

“That’s emergency preparedness?”

“Just a fancy term for what you do when everything’s so fucked up it’s borderline unfixable. How do you survive when everything’s falling apart and hopeless, when no one’s coming to rescue you?”

Richie’s fingers drummed on the stone next to Eddie’s hand, so close it must have been intentional, Eddie thought, _an offering, an invitation._ Eddie dug his own fingers into his thigh, and Richie withdrew his hand from between them.

“So what’s the backup plan, Kaspbrak?”

Eddie closed his eyes. “First off, we need a spot to meet up if we get separated, a place to regroup together. It always wanted to keep us apart before, target us individually. Logic says It’ll do the same now.” He opened his eyes to see Richie watching him. “But our odds are best if we stick together. Good emergency planning is contingent on partnership.”

Richie nodded back to the inn. “So here?”

“Too far from the Barrens if something happens there.”

Silence aside from Richie returning to drum his fingers on the stone steps again.

“The kissing bridge?” Richie suggested finally, voice a little distant.

“That’ll work.”

*

Eddie can’t gauge how far out the light source is - it’s too distant, unchanging except for a faint flicker that radiates unevenly, ramping up in intensity before easing back to a gentle glow - but still it remains far away and small, and Eddie’s immediate surroundings stay unknowable.

Forward. He continues on, past what feels like miles of pipe, past the burning in his knees that reverberates up his entire legs until every shuffle onward is painful. He feels hot despite the cold water rushing over his feet, splashing up in swells as high as his calves. Sweat dots his temples and pools under his armpits and on his lower back, and Eddie wonders if sepsis has already kicked in.

_I’ll need IV antibiotics, broad-spectrum aggressive ones: ceftriaxone, azithromycin, ciprofloxacin, vancomycin, and piperacillin-tazobactam. IV fluids, too. Probably vasopressors. Maybe dialysis if the kidneys are already affected. Surgery for any abscesses or gangrene._

Vertigo seizes him again, and Eddie falls into the metal siding of the pipe, clinging to the raised edges of the ridges to keep himself righted as the world around him swirls, the water rushing this way and that, pushing him backwards as his balance shifts and he loses perspective of which way is forward, which way is up or down. But it’s a lazier spin than before, slower and less violent, and it peters out quickly, leaving Eddie breathless and sick, but still able to stumble back to his feet and press on.

The pinprick of light takes on a clearer hue as he walks - warm like sunlight, he hopes - and while still too far to illuminate what’s around him, he thinks he might see vague shapes around the light source, outlines of something branching apart, and maybe other pipes.

And then - _fuck,_ he thinks, recoiling - his left foot suddenly drops down as the pipe in front of him ceases abruptly. He flings himself back, landing hard on his ass. Eddie crawls cautiously up to the precipice, feeling the jagged edge of the lip, then he circles the opening with his hands to determine the geography of what’s before him. Above him another pipe connects to the one he’s in, nearly vertical as far as he can tell, and it’s the source of the flow of greywater as it pumps gallons and gallons down over him; he shimmies out of the deluge to the very edge of the drop off and feels out for what’s below. A wall of sheet metal extends down, how far Eddie can’t tell.

There’s no way up the vertical pipe; not with its sheer edges and the onslaught of water pouring out of it. 

Eddie reaches down into the nothingness.

_What if it’s a drop back down to the cavern? What if it’s just a drop? Hundreds of feet down into fucking nothing?_

In the distance the light still shines. The path to it is in complete darkness. There’s nowhere else to go. There’s only one way forward.

Eddie jumps into the dark.

*

“At least chicks dig scars,” Richie had said to him as the Losers left the library for the house on Neibolt, hoping to head Bill off before he took on Pennywise alone, the impulsive idiot that he was.

Eddie rubbed his cheek. “Yeah, that’s definitely my primary concern.”

Undeterred,“When this is all done you can quit your shitty office gig and become - I don’t know - a pirate? Frankenstein at Universal Studios?”

“Dude, come on - ”

“Oh, what about a Scarface impersonator? _Say hello to my little friend._ ”

They fell to the back of the pack as the group hurried across the street, walking close enough to each other that Eddie could hear the squeak of the rubber of Richie’s soles against the concrete, the friction of his jacket against his jeans.

“I can’t handle one of your bits right now,” Eddie said, not altogether unkindly.

Eddie felt Richie’s eyes on him, but he didn’t look over. “Just wanted to lighten you up. You’ve gone up inside your squirrely head again. No panic attacks today, okay?”

His gut fluttered, weightless and queasy. 

A youth of stupid jokes and gags and annoying as hell pranks and the fucking impressions, and as a kid Eddie had only sort of understood why Richie spent all of his free time trying to make Eddie laugh; how every time his mother threatened to pull him from school and cut him off from the other Losers, sending Eddie whirling into a panicked spiral of _when will I see my friends_ , _what would I do without them_ , Richie always showed up at his window with some distractingly funny idea to pull Eddie out of his funk until the worst of his mom’s anger tapered; how after Bowers cornered Eddie and left him with Indian burns so severe he could barely wear long sleeves for a week, Richie walked him home that day and every day after, and made him laugh so hard that his asthma was triggered and they had to dig through his fanny pack to find his inhaler, Eddie still laughing through gasps as Richie shook the device for him; how Richie only seemed really happy when Eddie was happy. 

No, he hadn’t really understood it then, but Eddie did now.

“Thanks, Rich,” Eddie managed, shifting a few inches closer.

 _I missed you_ , he’d thought again and again. _No one in my life has ever tried to make me happy like you have._

*

Eddie cries out when he lands on his knees; raw flesh smashes into a metallic, riveted floor, and Eddie takes in sharp, hitched breaths as the pain ricochets up and down his legs, bone deep. He flexes both legs under him and maneuvers into a sitting position - nothing broken, at least - and he wonders about hairline fractures as his tibias throb under shredded skin. The drop was only six or seven feet, he thinks, while willing his knees to bend before managing to haul himself up to his feet unsteadily.

_Fuck fuck fuck._

Walking is borderline impossible.

He grazes his knees with his hands to feel thick rivulets of what he assumes must be blood running down his kneecaps and onto his jeans.

A stunted step forward, and his knees ache, open and hot and pounding in time with his erratic pulse. His legs buckle after only a few steps, and he braces for the fall, for the averted crash as he catches himself awkwardly and rights himself again, bent low in a weakass attempt to keep his balance and minimize the stabbing spasms in his meniscus.

 _Emergency preparedness_ , he had told Richie earlier - earlier that same day? Or was it yesterday? Eddie has lost all sense of how long it had been - but it certainly applies now. _How do you survive when everything’s falling apart and hopeless, when no one’s coming to rescue you?_ he had said.

When you’re alone and there’s nothing to aim for other than a glow of light at the end of a tunnel that may or may not be the product of a sepsis-induced hallucination. And even if it is real, what’s on the other side of the light isn’t all that welcoming either; a life you no longer want, your regrets fixed in the past, immutable.

Eddie forces his legs on anyway.

The smell is overwhelming - it must be a drainage center of some kind within the sewer works - and Eddie gags as he trudges forward toward the distant light, careful now to feel out the ground in front of him before putting any weight on it. 

The light grows stronger, more pronounced with every movement, and Eddie wipes the greywater still clinging to his lashes so he can better see the sunlight’s halo radiating in through an opening. Another pipe, he thinks, blinking. He sees a sway of something outside, tree branches maybe, and the thought of it - the thought of _anything_ that was outside of this hellhole, of fresh air and warmth and clean water - it spurs him on.

He can only move slowly though, legs leaden and burning. Every step causes the remaining, broken skin on his knees to split further, and he sobs as his left leg gives out unexpectedly, collapsing down in a painful bend that leaves him panting, struggling to stand again.

The rivets on the ground - he can see them now, faintly, under his sneakers with every shuffle forward - they’re streaked with the blood dripping from his knees, and Eddie tries not to think about it, tries to shut off the part of his brain that yells about infections and sepsis and blood poisoning, because he’s _finished_ ; he’s out of fucking gas and running on fumes and he needs to just keep going on, and the endless spiralling is slowing him the fuck down.

_Keep walking._

The wide expanse he’s been navigating comes into dim focus as he continues: a half-constructed landing filled with winding pipes carrying greywater or sewage judging from the stifled sound of rushing water filtering throughout the center. Industrial ladders are attached to a far wall, leading to lower levels and upper gangways, railed off. The pipe exiting out into the daylight - only a few hundred feet away now - carries a thin river of runoff out into what looks like the Barrens. 

He squints and can see the grass outside, the verdant green of alive matter, and he can hear something that must be wind blowing through the leaves. 

Every step is exhausting, debilitating, and each will be his last one, Eddie’s sure. He can’t possibly keep going when everything _hurts_ like this.

The pipe creaks as he steps into it, clanking to one side and sending Eddie into one of its rusted walls as it rolls off its mooring. He hits the wall hard, yelling as his blistered hands strike the barbed edges. Still, he keeps his balance and ducks forward into the narrow space and out into the blinding daylight.

The brightness is burning, white-hot and earnest, and Eddie closes his eyes as he careens out onto the grass, the image of the sun still branded onto his retinas. The last real light he saw were the Deadlights, however long ago that was, and they were a cool, foreboding sort of gleam, but here outside the sun is overwhelming and ablaze, and everything is washed out as Eddie blinks repeatedly, trying to adjust his sensitive, dilated eyes.

The grass is white and the trees are white and the sky is white and Eddie thinks he may never see again.

The outlines come into focus before the details; the enveloping shapes of maples and elms above, imprinted across a blazen sky, and Eddie feels wet rockbed underneath him - a stream, surrounded by larger boulders further away - and he looks around the burning blur that is his surroundings for any sense of direction.

There’s a steep hill to his immediate left, and he can’t make out the particulars of the undergrowth, but it seems brambled and rough, littered with pebbles.

He used to know the Barrens well, but this could be anywhere.

The Kenduskeag flows into town, he remembers, past the old iron works and near to the City Center. _Is this a tributary?_ _There was one near Kansas Street_ , he thinks, trying to recall the old maps that they’d once taped to the walls of Bill’s garage. _Or maybe it’s just a thin part of the river. Maybe it’s dried up._

Eddie limps forward to the river and follows it a few steps downstream before he hears something. Above him, somewhere up the hill, he hears -

Wheels on a road. A car stopping. A door opening and closing in quick succession.

“Help,” he yells, but his voice is almost silent, gravelly and constricted from mud and disuse and stress. His throat is tight, like it’s squeezed in on itself and he can’t produce more than weak wheezing. “Please,” he tries again, but only hot puffs of air escape his lips.

It’s pure instinct that hurls him up the hill, his whole body awake in pain as he scrambles up through thorns and sharpened nettles sticking into lacerated skin. The pebbles dig into his knees, the brambles into his palms, but he lunges up the hill anyway.

“Don’t go,” but his voice barely projects, muted.

His vision is still bleached out, but he thinks he sees something like a guardrail at the top of the hill; wooden posts, maybe, and he climbs towards it, trying again to call out only for his voice to fail in his throat.

Gnarled roots cover the earth, undulating up and down like frozen waves across the incline as Eddie approaches the fence, and his legs catch in them as he fights to free himself, kicking wildly at the tangled, ropey branches. “Help,” he _screams_ , _yells, sobs_ , but he can’t even hear the cry himself.

Eddie finally pulls his foot out from under the roots and lurches up the final feet of the hill. He hears footsteps, and then the _click_ of a car door opening again.

_Fuck. Don’t go. Don’t leave. Please._

His hand grabs the bottom of the post - leaving a bloody handprint in its wake - and Eddie hauls himself over the summit of the hill, gasping for desperate, urgent breaths of air.

“Please,” he chokes, waving in the direction of the car-shaped shadow.

A violent _thud_ as the car door slams closed, and Eddie can only make out the silhouette of someone running towards him, the blur of sneakers crossing asphalt, and then whoever it is jumps the fence to his side.

“911,” he wheezes inaudibly.

The person standing above him is still, silent aside from stressed breathing, and for a panicked moment Eddie thinks, hysterically, _Pennywise_ , but then -

“Eds?”

_Richie?_

Eddie flings his head up, but the sun is still too bright above to see anything but his outline.

Again, “Eds?” Richie’s voice breaks.

_How? You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead. The cave in and the boulders -_

And Richie’s arms are around him before he can even register it. Strong and large and reassuring, but shaking as he wraps around Eddie’s frame like he’s not covered in filth, like he doesn’t reek of shit and mud and greywater. Richie’s hands cup the nape of his neck and his shoulder, and he leans in so closely that even through half-conscious exhaustion Eddie thinks _he’s going to kiss me_ , but Richie doesn’t. Their foreheads touch instead, and Eddie blinks and blinks so that he can focus on Richie’s eyes, impossible to read through their shades of confusion and disbelief and trepidation and maybe something like elation. “Eds?” He repeats.

Eddie nods, face pressed into where Richie’s neck meets his shoulder.

_You’re dead, you’re dead. I thought you were fucking dead._

He smells like the cigarettes Bev has been smoking. He smells like cheap hotel shampoo and mint toothpaste. And like something else from summers past, something not found in nature but inherently personal; a smell from when they were small and curled up together under blankets in Richie’s room watching Saturday morning cartoons after a sleepover; a smell from when they were eighteen and in Stan’s backyard a week before Richie drove to California.

Eddie’s mouth is still thick with mud, his throat so constricted he thinks he might asphyxiate, but that matters less than the fact that he can’t form the words he wants to, _needs to_. All he can manage is to cling back, arms around Richie’s shoulders.

_You’re not dead._

Richie’s hand is suddenly on his chest, pushing through his torn shirt caked with long-dried blood and viscera, feeling the jagged, ropey scar the runs the length of his chest. “How is this possible?” He says. “You died. You weren’t breathing. There was blood everywhere.”

_Oh._

“Fuck, Eds. I’m so sorry.” 

_You left me._

“I swear, I’m so fucking sorry. You were dead, and it was imploding, and fuck.”

Richie’s face is squished into Eddie’s damp hair, and he feels him heaving, feels the heavy, rattling up and down of Richie’s chest against his like he’s winded, like his out-of-shape ass ran a mile.

“I shouldn’t have left. Jesus, Eds. Fuck. How the fuck are you alive? How the fuck did you climb out of there? I shouldn’t have - oh fuck - you were by yourself. I’m so sorry.”

_I left when I thought you were dead, too. I’m sorry, too._

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

A cough, full body racking, as Eddie turns and spits mud-slick sputum from his mouth onto the grass.

“Shit, I’m going to call an ambulance.”

When Eddie looks up again, the world around him is less washed out. It’s still overly bright and tinted white around the edges, but he can see the features of Richie’s face now: a forehead creased with worry, mouth slightly agape, red eyes and fat tears behind his glasses, wet eyelashes.

He sees the kissing bridge behind Richie.

“Don’t,” Eddie manages. The words form weak and quiet, but finally there.

“You need a hospital.”

_I don’t want to leave you again. We’ve left each other enough times now._

The inexplicably healed chest wound will beg for an isolated ICU visit, at least. Maybe quarantine. Maybe study. Experts will need to be called in. Advanced testing for sure, who the fuck knows what else, and if all of that seemed like a Goddamn reprieve only minutes ago, well -

That was before Richie.

And Richie is _alive_. They’re both _alive_ , and Eddie doesn’t want to be holed up in an isolation ward for God only knows how long when his whole useless life has been one giant isolation ward to keep himself _separate_ and _clean_ and _safe_ from experiences that hadn’t even been dangerous in the first place, he realizes now. He’s spent decades living in enforced sterility - loss mitigation, risk reduction - but Richie is _here_ , breathing and _alive_ and a fucking second chance incarnate, and Eddie isn’t wasting this moment alone in a hospital when Richie is holding him like this.

“No hospitals.”

He survived a fucking impalement. He’ll survive whatever he has now.

“Eds, your hands.”

He sees for the first time just how disgusting he is, how _leprous_. The skin on his hands is ripped open; entire layers chafed off so only a blistered and bleeding surface remains, shiny and virgin, yet still embedded with grime. His hoodie and jeans, and every bare patch of skin is crusted with mud and blood. The filth is dried to his hair, matted into his eyebrows, and the smell is terrible even to his accustomed nose; vinegary and soapy like industrial cleaners, synthetic and yet earthen, _dirty._ The muck has transferred over and Richie’s covered too - it streaks his grey hoodie, sloughs off on his cheeks and into the cracks of his glasses where he’d pressed his face to Eddie’s hair, and Eddie feels _diseased, infectious_ ; he’ll spread whatever he’s carrying to Richie _._

And the sensible thing would be for Richie to push him away, to keep him at a distance when Eddie’s so fucking contaminated, but Richie has never done the sensible thing, Eddie thinks, as Richie tightens his hold on him instead. Something in Eddie’s stomach flips at that idea, the fact that Richie stays even when Eddie is as toxic as he is now.

“No hospitals, please,” he insists, voice cracking. “I don’t want to get separated again.”

“Emergency preparedness? Stay together.” Richie touches their foreheads together again, one hand back to the scar across Eddie’s chest, tracing it, pressing his fingers into it as if to make sure it was completely closed. He’s breathless when he speaks, “How much medical shit do you have at the inn?”

Between what he’d packed and what Bev had ran out for afters Bowers showed up, _a lot_. “Enough.”

A hand cups his face like it had for a stolen moment on a chilly end of summer night decades ago, and Richie nods. “Okay, no hospitals. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Talk to me on [Tumblr](https://spunknbite.tumblr.com/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/spunknbite).


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